


the woods enclose

by sunburst



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Witchcraft, Fairy Tale Elements, Inspired by Studio Ghibli, M/M, a bit like howl's moving castle mixed with kiki's delivery service, all of svt are in here somewhere, lee seokmin: ghibli protagonist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:53:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29513487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunburst/pseuds/sunburst
Summary: “Anyways you’re mistaken. I’m not a witch like you,” Minghao says, refusing to look at Seokmin. “I’m something much worse.”Or: Seokmin moves to a new town, tries to find his voice, and breaks a curse.
Relationships: Lee Seokmin | DK/Xu Ming Hao | The8
Comments: 15
Kudos: 76
Collections: DK's Birthday Bash!





	the woods enclose

**Author's Note:**

> happy bday to some very cool boys <333 here is some magic
> 
> a [ playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6HzaOzulmPHkFe759RvFOb?si=P4zmu3BGR9OiHBC4yJLXWw) by karina!!

Everything in this forest is exactly as it seems.

Once there was a boy who was lost among the gloomy trees. In the middle of his journey, he came across a great silken black bird with an empty heart.

The bird’s eyes were quite sad, as it had spent much of its life waiting for someone.

Some eyes, they haunt you.

  
  
  


✧

  
  


The morning Seokmin meets the Witch of the Woods he is busy staring at the ocean and he makes a fool of himself during his landing. 

Really, it could happen to anyone. Especially in the city square. Seokmin’s hometown had a small central market, but this place is a different beast with stalls and stalls of vendors and townspeople milling around waving their silk handkerchiefs at the distant ocean liners. When Seokmin hits the ground he stumbles into the unexpected traffic, nearly collides with a horse-drawn cart full of handmade hats, then backs up too far and rams right into a conveniently placed guardsman. 

“Oh! I’m so sorry, sir! I—” 

Jihoon, whiskers poking up out of Seokmin’s cloak pocket, hisses when the guard jams an accusing finger in Seokmin’s startled face. 

Normally Seokmin might tell his familiar from in-between clenched teeth to smile and make a good impression, please. But the guard in front of them is scowling, and an attempt at endearment seems sort of pointless. 

“Do you have a license?”

Oh, sea and stars. Seokmin tries to buy time. 

“What, um, ah, for my broom?”

“No, for your cat. Yes, _of course,_ for your broom.”

“Well,” Seokmin begins, trying to sound confident, trying to feel the warm spark of his power in his own words, “it’s a funny story, actually—”

“Citation for flying without a license.”

The guard’s pulling his notepad out of his chest pocket. There is no magic to be felt in the airwaves. Seokmin’s voice sputters into uncertainty.

“No, wait, I— oh, please, I’m new in town, I’m not up to speed with the regulations, and—”

“Citation for admitting to being unaware of the regulations.”

“Wait—”

“Citation for talking back.” The guard stops scribbling in his notebook. “One more, and I’ll have to take you in. What did you say your name was? I haven’t heard of a new witch apprenticing in our town. What business do you have here? Got any identification on you?”

Seokmin swallows. A trickle of sweat drips down the back of his neck, icy in an October chill that lingers even in the sun. His stomach grumbles like a radiator. 

The guard taps his steel-toed boot, menacing.

Seokmin is running on five hours of nervous dreamless sleep, and Mingyu— thoughtful, talented, fantastic baker Mingyu— left him a nice plate of buttered blueberry scones on his bedside table. But he didn’t bother with any of that because he woke up determined to go exploring and find his breakfast for himself.

Like an idiot. 

“Say something,” Jihoon suggests very helpfully.

His cat is right, but what’s there to say? Seokmin’s not officially apprenticing with Mingyu because Mingyu isn’t a witch, he’s only a human. He’s only helping Seokmin find his feet. Yes, maybe this is a problem. Maybe Seokmin _should_ be working with a real witch and not with a baker. If he were doing that he’d probably be able to find a smart way out of this.

He scrambles for a solid story. At the forefront of his head is his own voice, the one that never seems to come out right lately: You’ve never been a good liar, Seokmin. 

“If any other witch is out there,” he whispers, ducking his head down against the harsh daylight, his eyes already prickling at how useless his own words probably are, “please help me.”

“What was that?”

The guard’s shadow is closer. Seokmin takes a breath. This is it. End of the very first week of his new life, and it’s already about to be over. 

He keeps his gaze downward and opens his mouth to confess to everything bad he’s ever done. He thinks about simply giving up and going back home. To the counter of his mother’s plant and potion shop, or to the greenhouse behind the store. Where he could sing for the sake of singing, where he could let his voice soar as easy as the birds who skim the waves here. Beautiful and silly and free. 

He wouldn’t have a higher purpose, but it wouldn’t be so bad. At least it wouldn’t be frightening.

Then a hand lands on his shoulder, gentle and firm. 

“There you are, sweetheart,” says a soft voice very close to his ear, and the back of his neck prickles with goosebumps. “Sorry I’m late. I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

The words wither in Seokmin’s throat. The air fizzles, static-trapped, as if a lightning bolt has spliced through the puffy clouds and created a crack in the azure sky. 

The comforting hearty noise from the street vendors and the people and the locomotives condenses into a hum that vibrates in Seokmin’s teeth. This is magic. Powerful magic. 

“Looked to me like you were just leaving,” the stranger tells the guard. 

The stranger is a witch. His magic shivers in Seokmin liquid hot. It feels like being too close to a fireplace. In front of them, the guard’s face turns blank and his arms hang limply at his sides. 

From the periphery of his vision Seokmin sees the other witch’s long pinky finger twirl a circle into the air, a red jewel in his ring catching the sun and glinting. The guard jerks into motion, turns around and marches off across the square.

Seokmin chances a look to his side. 

His savior has the face of a forest spirit, or someone who knows all about tarot cards. The slightly pointed tips of his ears poke out from the black hair that hangs in his velvety eyes like windblown tussled feathers. He’s very beautiful.

“Uh,” Seokmin says with great eloquence, cheeks flaming. He must look like an idiot with his training broom and no apprenticeship papers and forlorn teary face.

“Where to?” the other witch asks. His lips are inches away and not quite smiling, but his eyes are. He’s wearing a long cloak of gauzy black and green. A blue pendant gleams against his white poet blouse. “I can be your guide this morning.”

“I was just, um. I just wanted to go to the, um, bakery. Not— not Kim Bakery, a different one?”

The witch leans even closer. He’s the same height as Seokmin and he smells the same as the evergreens, pine-sharp with a sweetness behind it.

“Don’t be alarmed, but we’re being watched.”

Seokmin looks up and startles. 

The fishmonger is dangling a salmon in the air having forgotten she’s holding it and the vegetable vendor has spilled a bag of mushrooms and the horse-drawn cart has come to an abrupt stop in the middle of the square. The entire Sunday morning crowd is at a total standstill to watch the two of them. 

The witch offers his elbow, wordless, his bishop sleeve billowing in the wind. 

Seokmin takes his arm.

They start to walk, their steps falling into alignment. Seokmin stares down at the cobblestones so he can forget about everything, including the face so near to his own, radiating light like the moon. The other witch is wearing heeled leather boots with delicate laces. He has an easy controlled grace. Despite the heels, his steps are soundless. He must be a very good dancer. 

He seems to be pulling back on his magic, because when Seokmin glances upward, a smattering of guardsmen stand scowling at them. A few begin to approach, pulling together in a bristling group. Seokmin shakes his daze and opens his mouth to point them out. But the other witch is miles ahead. 

“You’re not new to flying, are you?” 

Seokmin lets out a puff of breath and shakes his head. 

“Good.” 

The witch wraps an arm flush around his waist. And then, easier than Seokmin has ever managed to do with his own broom, they shoot up into the sky. 

Jihoon lets out a startled _mraow!_ and the ends of Seokmin’s cloak billow around him as if gravity has forgotten its own existence. “Oh my god, oh my god,” Seokmin manages, his right hand gripping his broom as tight as possible, his knees instinctively tucking against his chest. 

“Now, straighten your legs,” the witch advises, “and start walking.”

The witch is holding his far hand, arm slung across Seokmin’s shoulders. Their fingers are intertwined. Seokmin looks over at him for reassurance and his breath is snatched from his throat. 

The witch’s cloak glides behind him, catching beams of sunlight. His hair floats briefly away from his eyes. He could be an enchanted prince from a far land or a fairytale stepped off the pages of a book. Staring at him, Seokmin’s heart feels like it’s about to float right out of his chest. 

But the witch gives him a meaningful look, so he tries his best to fall into step. They’re walking through the sky together, same as they had on solid earth. It becomes a waltz in mid-air to no music except for the wind. They’re in tune with each other, easy as a good song, and Seokmin’s heart swoops.

Flying has never, ever felt like this before. Never this simple. He can’t help it. He laughs, the sound spilling out of him sudden and joyous. The city is spreading out beneath them, a patchwork of pastoral and modern with its friendly thatched roofs and clock tower and traffic-choked streets. It looks so kind from this distance. 

“Isn’t this nicer than your broom,” the witch says warmly. In front of them, the ocean rolls endless and blue. Seokmin laughs again, only able to nod. Soon they land in a narrow alley in a slow careful descent. He nearly buckles, knees shaky, but the witch holds his waist firmly until he finds his legs. 

“Wow,” Seokmin mutters. “That was— wow.”

The witch laughs. It’s the nicest thing Seokmin has ever heard, and Seokmin is a song witch who knows a thing or two about beautiful sounds. 

“The bakery's just around the corner. Wait a few seconds just to be sure you haven’t been seen, and then go. Okay?”

“Promise.”

“Good,” his mysterious rescuer says, finally smiling in full. It lights his entire face up. 

“Why did you help me?” Seokmin asks, breathless, his heart picking up speed like a bicycle rolling downhill. “No— first, who are you?”

The smile disappears. 

Something in the witch’s face darkens, a cloud crossing the sun. He glances around, jerky, flighty, then over his shoulder as if he’s being watched, even though there’s no one else close by. 

He begins to back away into the shadows. He almost looks haunted. It’s as if, Seokmin realizes, as if he has somehow found himself in this alleyway with no memory of getting here. No memory of saving Seokmin.

“Please,” Seokmin says, heart already all the way on his sleeve. 

But before Seokmin can repeat his question and ask twenty million more (what kind of magic was that, why did he call Seokmin _sweetheart_ in his calm gentle voice, how did he fly without a broom) the witch looks skyward then shoots up into the air again like a falling star in reverse. 

Seokmin gasps and cranes his neck to watch. There’s a distant sound, a rustling of cold wind. In a few seconds, the green-cloaked stranger is nothing but a spot of darkness against the sun. 

He leaves only what looks like, weirdly, a single feather, glossy in the light, floating down toward the ground in a slow dance. 

Seokmin reaches up and plucks it out of the air. It’s the size of his hand, pitch black and silky. 

“Well,” Jihoon says, poking his head up out of Seokmin’s cloak pocket, ears tucked back against his head in mild terror, “that was interesting.”

Seokmin brushes the feather against his cheek dreamily. It’s warm. It smells like the earth of the forest. 

✧

  
  


“I heard _someone_ met the Witch of the Woods this morning,” Mingyu says, his husky voice gleeful with the promise of gossip. 

Seokmin groans and ducks his head to hide his flush. Mingyu laughs and keeps kneading his dough with typical deceptive ease. Seokmin tried to help out a few minutes ago and did something very wrong, and Mingyu had to start the dough all over again. 

Seokmin is sure he’ll be ribbed extensively about his poor kitchen skills in the near future. But who can blame him! Trying to be a baker, much like trying to be a real witch, is harder than it looks.

“I didn’t know it was the Witch of the Woods,” Seokmin insists. “Honest.”

He presses his palm against his cheek. He’s drowsy from a long day of exploring Main Street and trying not to get into more trouble. Sitting at the kitchen table near the hearth, watching the crackling wood fire glowing on the hanging bundles of thyme and sage and vervain, he’s lulled into the peace of what almost feels like home. Late October isn’t able to reach its frost-tipped fingers into Kim Bakery.

Mingyu shoots him a knowing smile. “Of course you didn’t know.”

“No, really!” Seokmin hasn’t heard many of the legends and myths that seem to set everyone’s imaginations on fire, but he has caught wind of the odd whisper about a witch who lives in an ivy-covered tower in the forest. 

Before Mingyu can launch into a dramatic retelling of one of the juicier rumors, he pauses to work at a tricky part, his brow furrowing and his biceps tensing, mouth pursing slightly. Seokmin feels a flutter of fondness for him. Mingyu is already so familiar. It’s like they’ve known each other for years. Even though they met for the first time just a week ago, the morning after Seokmin set out to find his very own town but instead fell asleep in a cattle train and ended up accidentally hitching a ride all the way to this hamlet at the edge of the sea. 

It took Seokmin only that first morning to fall in love with the place. It reminded him of the gilt-decorated picture books his mother used to read to him when he was younger, when he had so many impractical dreams and still believed all sorts of wonderful things were stone-set his future. If those dreams could happen anywhere, it would be here, a sea on one side, a forest on the other.

But actually becoming a townsperson proved to be difficult. Seokmin had a long and frustrating first day of smiling at everyone and eventually being cornered into admitting that even though he was twenty years old, he didn’t have an official apprenticeship with another witch, or any money, and no, it wasn’t necessary to contact his mother— really! Please, that would be kind of embarrassing actually— 

By the end of the day, he hadn’t found an available room anywhere, which was more than a little disheartening. He wandered near Kim Bakery as the sun began to sink beneath the ocean, staring off at the bruised purple clouds in the distance, brooding.

He’d always hated how easily dejected he got. But he’d never been this alone before, had never quite felt this insignificant. 

The worst part was that it wasn’t even a very unfamiliar feeling. Maybe it had always been inside of him. Maybe he’d always known he wasn’t worth much. He figured he had a right to feel a little sorry for himself.

“I think this is the lowest decibel level you’ve ever averaged in a day,” Jihoon said from his shoulder.

Back in his mother’s shop it was a well-known fact that Seokmin couldn’t stand silence. Even when customers weren’t around and he was in the greenhouse doing prep, he loved talking to the plants, telling them about his day, encouraging them. Often he’d sing to them. But something about this town, or about simply being all on his own, was so stifling. 

Before Seokmin could think of something smart to say back to Jihoon a shadow fell on them. He looked up and saw another witch swooping over their heads. She had a big red bow perched on top of her strawberry blonde hair. 

His heart lifted a little, watching her sail away on her broom. So there were other witches in this town. He wasn’t completely alone.

“Miss Yeri! Miss Yeri—!” 

A tall tan man came running up, waving a piece of paper in his hand and hollering at the top of his lungs, “You forgot your recipe!”

The witch, Yeri, was already far from earshot. The man sighed. He was wearing a floury apron and he looked a bit too boyishly handsome to be a real baker. But Seokmin decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. Plus, he was too worn out to feel timid and felt he should take advantage of that.

“You’re Kim? Of Kim Bakery?”

“Mingyu Kim of Kim Bakery, that’s me,” the baker confirmed, looking hassled. “Yeri was just at the apothecary next door because she’s headed out of town and needs to make an extra batch of lavender-and-Valerian-tincture. She’s a dream witch, you see. But she came in for a pastry and she forgot her recipe on the counter, and…” 

He eyed Seokmin. More precisely, Seokmin’s broom.

“Listen, do you think you could…?” 

Seokmin was good at grasping onto straws. He saw a shining chance. 

“Yes, of course I can!” 

He straightened and put on his most charming smile, which he’d perfected behind the counter of his mother’s shop. Even though it was all falsity he could tell it worked, because Mingyu looked off to the side, reddening like it had become difficult to look him right in the eyes. 

After Seokmin delivered the recipe back to Yeri he followed Mingyu inside the bakery and told him about his situation, and it only felt a bit like begging. Mingyu offered him a room in the attic in exchange for the occasional magical delivery around town. 

“The place isn’t much,” Mingyu said almost shyly, “but I promise I’ll be a good housemate.”

Seokmin has discovered in the last week that although the attic room is flour-dusted and cobwebbed, the bed is warm and soft. In the mornings Mingyu makes breakfast for both of them. The first day, when he made panettone french toast topped with cream and berries and a fine layer of confectioner’s sugar, Seokmin took one bite and was immediately convinced that Mingyu had to be a hedge witch with incredible restorative powers that seeped into everything he made.

But by now, Seokmin knows that Mingyu isn’t a hedge witch. It’s just— he’s good at what he does, and he’s a hard worker and a perfectionist. Which is kind of boring, and, Seokmin thinks, a little bit disappointing. No easy answers. Just lots of waking up early and tinkering with recipes and having super high standards.

In the last week, during working hours Seokmin’s been helping Mingyu out in the storefront, charming mothers and chatting with middle schoolers on their lunch break. Afterward, apart from the occasional rare delivery, he spends his free time in the cozy apartment above the bakery supposedly reading up on the art of song magic. This is the first time he’s really ventured out into the town alone. Normally he loves to explore, but the failure of his first day is kind of unforgettable. He’s somehow lucked into the arrangement with Mingyu, but it’s becoming more and more apparent that real life in a city isn’t going to be simple or easy. It’s going to be complex and often embarrassing, and he has a lot to learn.

If only he wasn’t so scared of that.

Mingyu is still intent on prodding for details about his morning adventure. “So was the Witch as horrifying as all the stories say?”

“What? Horrifying?”

Mingyu’s voice drops to a melodramatic whisper. “I heard that when travelers get lost in the woods, he lures them into his castle and pecks out their hearts.”

Seokmin almost topples his mug from laughing too hard. Jihoon spills from his lap with a squeak. 

“That’s the most ridiculous— what! You can’t seriously believe that! Sorry, Jihoon.” His familiar leaps back up, disgruntled but forgiving. 

Mingyu pouts. “Okay, okay, fine. Maybe that one’s a little dramatic. But I _have_ heard there’s a curse on him. That’s why he can’t leave his castle for very long.”

Seokmin scratches under Jihoon’s chin until he starts purring again. “Well, what happens if he does?”

“He turns into a giant bird,” Mingyu says very seriously. “Stop laughing at me! You’re going to drop your cat again! He really does, honest! Swear on the stars!”

“Really,” Seokmin manages, breathless. “A giant bird.”

“Okay, listen. The story goes,” Mingyu says, hushed once more, glancing around like there are people outside the window listening in on their conversation, “the Witch of the Woods was once a normal magician. But then he fell in love with a boy and gave him his heart.”

Seokmin wrinkles his nose. “Gave him his heart?”

“Right, but the boy ran away with it. So now the Witch is doomed to live in his castle without a heart. That’s why he turns into a bird. He’s losing his humanity.”

“Oh.”

Mingyu’s hands come to rest on the flour-dusted counter, his expression questioning something in Seokmin’s voice. 

Seokmin stares into the smoke curling up from his tea and bites the inside of his cheek. It’s starting to rain outside. The patter makes music on their roof. The fire crackles and whispers, telling old tales. 

It feels nice to be warm and well-fed near a kind-hearted friend, but some aren’t so lucky.

“That’s really quite a sad story,” Seokmin says, soft with a newfound melancholy.

  
  


✧

  
  


On Monday after the working hours are over, Seokmin makes a delivery for a sigil witch named Wonwoo who runs a magical bookshop just off Main Street. The sun has set by the time he reaches the store, and the closed sign is already hanging on the doorknob. 

Seokmin shivers and wraps his red autumn cloak tighter around himself. He tucks his nose into a scarf that Mingyu lent him and waits, peering into a window, hoping to be noticed soon. Inside, making notes in a ledger at the counter, Wonwoo seems to be a very put-together witch. He has glasses and a sharp angular face. The sleeves of his comfy knit sweater are rolled up to reveal heavy sleeves of sigil tattoos running up and down his pale arms. 

Seokmin takes a deep breath and raps at the windowpane. Wonwoo starts and beckons him in. 

“That noise,” Wonwoo says when Seokmin shuffles over the threshold. His voice is deep and warm. “Thought it was a bird hitting the window.”

Seokmin laughs. It’s too loud. He’s nervous the way he usually is around handsome people. “No, not at all. I’m Seokmin. I’m a new witch in town and I run— well, I help with a delivery service. Someone named, er, Hoshi— he dropped this off for you on Sunday?”

Jihoon leaps out from his cloak pocket and lands on the counter. Normally his familiar likes to keep his distance from immediate situations, an expression of Seokmin at his smartest and most guarded. But he must find Wonwoo intriguing. 

Wonwoo smiles a kind smile, his nose scrunching as he scritches behind the cat’s ears. “I’ve been waiting for this package. It’s a copy of an old grimoire from the seventeenth century.” 

He takes the box and slices the cardboard open with something that’s really more of a jeweled dagger than a letter opener. The grimoire is bound in old leather and releases a puff of dust that lingers like a small cloud. Wonwoo looks down at its cover with great excitement.

“I like this witch,” Jihoon decides, licking his paw. “You should stick around and ask him for advice.”

“I’ve been doing research on a certain type of— oh, I don’t want to bore you. I tend to ramble and get too technical when I’m excited, I’m told.” Wonwoo pushes his glasses up his nose, embarrassed.

“Tell me,” Seokmin encourages. He recognizes that painful self-awareness. “I might not understand all of it, but I can listen!”

He lets Wonwoo talk at him for a few minutes about a certain curse he’s trying to find a cure for, something involving this Hoshi who dropped the book off and who seems to be very troubled, all entangled in a lasting contract of some sort. True to his word, Seokmin understands few of the details but is unerringly enthusiastic and asks many follow-up questions that probably don’t make much sense. 

Wonwoo takes a liking to him and even gives him a sigil tapestry to put on his bedroom wall before he leaves. “It signifies discovery,” Wonwoo explains. “I hope you find your way. I can feel a lot of magic in you waiting to be known.”

“Very neat,” Seokmin says. He grins and flashes a lame thumbs up. “Hope that happens for me.”

“Come to me any time for advice. Really, I mean it. I remember having a lot of trouble in my training year.”

“Right.” He tries not to state the obvious, which is, Wonwoo was probably a lot younger than Seokmin is now when he took his year. 

In the last few years, Seokmin seemed to be living out an unspoken and everlasting summer job at his mother’s shop. It should have felt more temporary than it did. But it was so easy to slip into being instructed to do this-or-that, to avoid any uncertainty, to have structure. 

Now having to wonder about what he can and can’t do and what he should do and what he should be capable of doing feels like entirely too much. Sometimes he feels so small, so young. Even though he isn’t anymore. 

Seokmin folds the tapestry into eighths and tucks it into his pocket in a haphazard rush to get outside. The bell jingles when he pushes the door open, but Wonwoo calls his name before he can leave.

“I heard you met the Witch of the Woods yesterday.”

Wonwoo’s face is unreadable. Seokmin hesitates for a second too long. He’s sure it shows on his expression, how uncertain he is if he’s on unsteady ground. He had thought that Wonwoo, being another witch, might be more sympathetic toward the Witch of the Woods than someone like Mingyu is. But he isn’t so sure anymore.

“Tell me if you know the Witch,” Seokmin says, a particular urgency in his voice.

Wonwoo seems to consider something deeply for a few seconds. “Be careful which stories you believe,” he says eventually. 

His eyes are reluctant, as if he is being persuaded to say something he shouldn’t. 

Seokmin lingers for a few more seconds, wanting to ask for more. But Wonwoo tears his gaze away with what seems like no small amount of difficulty and goes back to studying the grimoire.

“Don’t forget your familiar,” he says without looking up, a smile in his voice. 

Jihoon stalks out from behind the counter, tail twitching. “I was waiting for you to notice,” he says. Seokmin tries to pick him up, but he slips away from between his arms and trots out onto the street. “Maybe I’ll just run away someday and live at Wonwoo’s forever,” he claims over the apologies and protests, and Seokmin has to buy him a little herring from the fishmonger to entice him into forgiveness.

✧

  
  


The next afternoon Seokmin is folding cake boxes when Mingyu corners him.

“Yeri’s part of a coven, you know.”

“Oh?”

“One of the witches, Seulgi, came by yesterday when you were out. She was telling me about the training period and all. And…”

Seokmin doesn’t like where this is headed. “Oh, no.”

“Don’t look so gloomy, it doesn’t suit you,” Mingyu laughs. “I brought you up and she mentioned that— well, you should probably be…”

“Actually training,” Seokmin finishes, and sighs helplessly. “I know.”

“Well?”

He stares hard at the sad flat box in front of him. “I’m okay with just deliveries for now,” he says, and continues struggling with the box. It flops to one side and then the other, wobbly and difficult. “Why won’t you— ugh. Please cooperate.” 

He finishes slotting the pieces into place. When he looks up again Mingyu is staring at him.

“I think you just did magic,” Mingyu says.

“What?”

“With the box.”

He laughs at Mingyu’s face. “Dumb. That wasn’t magic.”

Mingyu looks uncertain for a few more seconds then chooses to move on. “Seulgi said if you don’t start practicing soon, bad things might happen.”

“Define bad things?”

“I don’t know! She was vague about it. Just think about it. Please?”

When Seokmin does nothing but make a face, Mingyu inches closer.

“Can I ask why you— uh, why you don’t want to think about it?”

Seokmin sighs and makes a frustrated gesture with his hands.

“I just…sometimes it’s really difficult for me, for some reason. I’m reading theory and I know I’m not good with all of that and I should just try practicing, but I feel— well, not incompetent, exactly. Just unsure.”

“About?”

“About if…about if I’m a good witch, I guess.”

Mingyu lets him wallow for a few more seconds. Then he says, rushed, “I just think you should— well, we could try setting up something on the side. You want to try healing songs, right? How are you going to get anywhere or feel any better about yourself if you don’t practice? Everyone starts somewhere. Why don’t you do deliveries _and_ healing appointments?”

Seokmin knows about Mingyu’s incredible ability to look like a kicked puppy if he doesn’t get exactly what he wants. But Mingyu probably doesn’t know yet that Seokmin can very well rival him in terms of winning sympathy through a forlorn expression. He pulls a dramatic pleading face, but its effect falls flat when Mingyu laughs at him and tries to poke the dimple digging into his chin.

Seokmin dodges his massive floury hand and makes an annoyed noise. “Fine. Fine! I guess I could give it a shot.”

“Good, I’m glad. Because I already started advertising, and you already have a customer.”

“What!” 

He tosses a flat cake box in Mingyu’s direction and Mingyu yelps and bats it away. 

“You’re going to thank me later! It’s for your own good!”

✧

  
  


That night Seokmin decides he is, in fact, _not_ going to thank Mingyu. Because the customer Mingyu has wrangled for him apparently lives smack in the middle of the woods.

Hovering above the forest with his poor broom putting up its best fight against the force of the wind, Seokmin squints down at the map Mingyu made for him. Cloud-cover is dimming the night and his nose is pink and runny. 

“Cold, cold, cold. It’s so cold. I think we have to go to our left,” he says to Jihoon on his shoulder. 

“Are you sure?”

“I’m not sure of anything! It all looks the same, doesn’t it?”

The trees are a uniform shade of dark green. Seokmin is certain none of the moonlight can break through to the forest floor. The woods are eerie, eerie as the stories he’s heard, and he keeps talking to himself and to Jihoon to keep from feeling afraid. Like when he was a kid and he was scared of locking up his mom’s shop alone so he’d sing at the top of lungs as he walked from the greenhouse to the front of the shop.

“Doesn’t it look like rain soon? Or snow? Look at the clouds. They look just like cotton candy. Like you could grab pieces of them. I wonder if it snows this early here.”

“It’s only October.”

“I know, but—” 

A hawk screeches near them. Seokmin gasps and nearly drops the map. 

“Wish my hands were warmer,” he mutters. “Really I wish I could just forget all about this whole thing.”

An abrupt gale buffets his broom quite unexpectedly into a tree. 

Bunches of prickly pine needles scrape against his cheek and Seokmin yelps and covers his face with both hands. Unfortunately, this means that he has let go of his broom and is now tumbling downward in free-fall, slowed only by the dense thicket of greenery. 

It’s like being dropped into the ocean. It’s impossible to tell which way is up. He and Jihoon make a jagged path through the foliage until they land next to each on the littered and damp forest floor dazed (Seokmin) and feet-first (Jihoon).

When he was younger, Seokmin used to have a lot of trouble with flying. Not so much getting in the air— that part was doable. More like, he’d look over the side and see the ground so, so far beneath, and instantly something or another would go wrong. 

One time, Jeonghan and Joshua, two glamour witches who lived next-door, dared him to steal a jackfruit from their neighbor’s tree. Seokmin managed to pluck the fruit and then immediately realized how high up he was. It resulted in a broken broom and a broken arm and lots of scolding from his mother. Later, as an apology, Joshua bought some spare materials and Jeonghan helped him make a new training broom. It was a good way to heal both Seokmin’s bruised confidence and their friendship. 

Now that very broom is broken once more. Cracked clean into two, jagged at both edges, lying inert on the forest floor. 

“Oh, stars,” Seokmin groans, kneeling on the ground, hovering his hands over the fragments like if he touches it, it’ll make the situation real. He’ll have to repair it all by himself, or make himself a brand new one. “Oh no, oh no, oh no—”

“Calm down,” Jihoon says, batting at his nose to get his attention. “We need to figure out where to go.” 

Seokmin’s too dejected to stand up and look around. Jihoon leaps onto his shoulder, a tiny ball of furry warmth, and tells him sternly to get his map out. 

Right. The map. No use in sitting here panicking, Seokmin. His hands are shaky with both adrenaline and the cold, and he can’t concentrate at all. He keeps thinking about how dumb he is and how if he’d just told Mingyu he didn’t want to do this, or if he’d just been able to dodge the stupid tree, or if he’d just never left home in the very first place then none of this would even be— 

“We have to go straight for a few more meters,” Jihoon announces. “Then we turn left.” 

Jihoon seems to be reading the directions wrong. Seokmin smooths the mess of his own hair out of his eyes and brings the map closer to his face. Its print is near illegible in the darkness. 

“The bakery’s the other way, though. We have to get out of this forest.”

“The job is that way.”

Seokmin frowns and turns to look at Jihoon.

“What job?”

“You can’t be serious.” Jihoon’s ears are tucked back tight against his sleek black head in distress. “What do you mean, what job? Don’t you remember the job?”

Seokmin tries. He comes up with nothing. 

“Please let’s just get out of here,” he says, extremely unsettled. 

He gets to his feet, ignoring Jihoon’s baffled protests, slides the two pathetic pieces of his broom into his cloak pocket, then begins to walk in a random direction with increasing panic. Up above the moon is hiding away, speckled through the trees like leopard spots. 

He thinks as he walks. He’s very lost. And his broom is broken. And even worse, the forest is starting to feel alive. 

There are some forests you know inside your bones and teeth that you shouldn’t enter at all. Jeonghan used to spook him by telling stories of woods that were really whirlpools in disguise: travelers would walk round and round in unknowing circles that became smaller and smaller as the forest drew them in towards the center, where some kind of horrific thing with a great ravenous hunger lay in wait for them.

Maybe Jeonghan had used some kind of magic on him then, because now, when Seokmin repeats his advice from those years ago in an attempt at reassurance, it seems to be coming true.

“Don’t enter a forest where you can’t see your own shadow,” Seokmin says out loud. 

He imagines Jeonghan’s face drawn in some approximation of mystical warning. He looks behind him and realizes his shadow blends with those of the trees. 

“A forest like that,” he mumbles, suddenly disoriented, “you can’t leave until it lets you. Jihoon, I feel strange.”

He half-hears his own words. It’s the opposite of what magic should feel like. His voice is coming out distant and detached, as if he’s miles away from his own body. He starts to hum the tune of an old pop song he heard on Mingyu’s radio the other day. Jihoon is silent, so Seokmin hums louder, to make enough noise for the both of them. 

They pass by a long and slender tree. At a second look, claw-marks are visible running down its bark deep as a gash. The tree trickles dark sap that looks like blood. 

A wave of horror passes through Seokmin. He stops humming and squeezes his eyes shut and keeps walking, the freezing wind slapping at his face providing the only proof that he’s moving at all. 

When he opens his eyes he sees another claw-mark in another scarlet slash in a tree. It looks like the same tree, even though he’s certain they’ve just passed it. The dark liquid is gushing now. It’s like the tree is being bled dry. It sends shivers up Seokmin’s neck. He stands there staring at it dumbly for a few seconds before starting again over the carpet of dead leaves and moss beginning to crystallize in frost. 

“Jihoon, Jihoon. Didn’t we already—”

Jihoon is still silent. 

Seokmin looks over his shoulder. His familiar is nowhere to be seen.

He’s alone.

He comes to a stop again. He can’t even seem to remember why he’s here in the first place. Here in the strange forest at night with the moon barely peeking through the clouds and the underbrush. It’s not a very pleasant place to be. He feels dazed, like he’s accidentally had way too much of his mother’s sleep-aid potion. He blinks hard to chase away the darkness gathering at the corners of his vision. 

“I feel like we’re walking in circles,” he slurs, before remembering that there’s no one to talk to. But it seems he should keep talking. He takes one step forward. “It feels like I’m falling,” he says to himself. Each step is another descent into something stranger. He can’t really help where he’s going, much less understand why. He takes another step, and then another. He’s in a clearing. There’s a tall thin ivy-spangled tower in front of him gleaming as bright as polished silver. 

“A tower,” he says to himself. “You’re at a tower, Seokmin. Look at that. It’s a tower in the woods. Go ask for help.”

The entrance is growing closer. He isn’t aware of moving towards it at all. It’s as if he’s being puppeteered. He hears birdsong. There are open cages hanging from the rafters, so many birds, grey doves, sparrows, a raven. He reaches toward the door, swaying on his feet, misses the handle three times. There’s a door knocker above the handle in the shape of a crow’s head. Seokmin grasps for it and never gets there. 

The door swings open on its own. Magic? Is that magic? Is the door magical? Someone grabs him by his elbow and tugs him over the threshold, saying something into his ear, and the world clears, trickles of rain down his fogged-up window. 

“—took you long enough.”

“Huh?” 

Seokmin shakes his head like a dog dislodging water droplets. He’s standing in a dark warm low-ceilinged room. There’s a slender person in front of him with friendly smiling eyes and hair that looks white in the dim firelight. 

“We’ve been waiting for you!”

“For… for me?”

“I’m Hoshi.”

The name sounds familiar. He can hear someone saying it. He recalls the owner of the distinctive voice and claps his hands together with relief. It’s so loud that he startles himself, but he laughs it off. He feels much more like himself already. 

“Right, Hoshi! You had the delivery for Wonwoo!”

“You’re right.” Hoshi glances over his shoulder like someone might be eavesdropping and steps closer, smile curving the corners of his eyes. “Come closer to the fire, come on. You’re probably cold, huh? The forest gets like this in late autumn. And call me Soonyoung, please. I think we might become friends. All my friends call me Soonyoung. Well, the few friends that I have, I suppose.”

Seokmin kneels by the fire, keeping his eyes on Soonyoung as he warms his hands. “Which one’s your real name?” 

“What’s a real name anyways,” Soonyoung says cheerfully. 

Seokmin takes stock of the room. A fire flickers in the grate and cauldrons hang from the ceiling beams. He hadn’t noticed before, but there are messy stacks of books and scrolls and bunches of plants and flowers on the big table in the center of the room. He recognizes tiny white bells of enchanter’s nightshade, drooping purple wolfsbane, a sprig of hemlock.

“This is a witch’s house, isn’t it,” he realizes.

“Castle,” Soonyoung corrects. “Witch’s castle.”

“Why am I here? It felt like I was called here by something.” 

In front of them, a large canvas is propped against a curve of the stone walls. Its oil paint is glossy in the firelight. It’s an abstract piece with shapes of bright green and blue. 

Soonyoung notices Seokmin looking. “He got frustrated and had to go cool off, I guess. Artists! So mercurial, eh? He went outside. You just missed him, actually.”

Seokmin gives his own head another good shake. Things are clearer than before but still misty, like reality is a door that doesn’t quite fit into its hinge. 

“Who…who did I…” 

A memory breaks the surface of his hazy mind. 

“Oh, I was supposed to come here! This is…I had some kind of healing appointment. This is the place, isn’t it?”

“Right,” Soonyoung confirms. “So it is. Said we were waiting for you, didn’t I?”

“Who’s we, exactly?” 

“This is the castle of the Witch in the Woods.” 

The very name holds a curious power that thrums like the pluck of a guitar string. Seokmin thinks of the Witch. That calm beautiful face, the secure hand, the feeling of floating. Not flying— floating.

“The Witch of the Woods wanted to have a healing appointment with _me?"_

Soonyoung only studies him, saying nothing, his sparkling eyes illegible.

Seokmin asks, his voice lowering in uncertainty, “He really wanted me to come here?”

“Say,” Soonyoung says, suddenly very near, “you have a strange energy to you, you know.”

Seokmin is surprised into a laugh at the non-sequitur. He doesn’t move, but he leans back a little.

“Strange energy?”

“A lot of magic. A lot. But it feels a little…trapped.” Soonyoung radiates an odd type of heat and is hard to look at directly. His hair is too bright. “In fact, I think you might be under a curse.”

“I think you’re mistaken,” Seokmin says, trying not to back away. “I’m just a witch in training, and not a very good one. No one would bother to curse me.”

“Are you sure?” Soonyoung squints like he’s studying a page of a book. “Listen, if you can break the curse on the Witch, then he’ll help break the curse on you.”

“Promise?”

“We’re not so good with promises,” Soonyoung says, his teeth blinding white in his wide smile, “but I know he’ll try his best. Go outside and find him, would you?”

Seokmin wonders who Soonyoung is, exactly, in regards to the Witch. But instead of asking he finds himself already half out the door, past the open cages. A phantom hand is on his shoulder guiding him. 

Seokmin doesn’t need to check where he’s going. He can feel it in the air, a sort of humming song. The kind that only the birds can hear.

For a few seconds it makes itself known to him and only him, leading him where he is meant to be led.

A ways into the forest, caught under a trembling moonbeam, The Witch of the Woods is perched high in a fir tree. He crouches like a half-feral thing on a skeletal branch. His cloak trails beneath him, the color of kelp beneath the ocean.

The night Seokmin set out from home he left all his black clothes behind. “Witches have always worn dark shades,” his mother said, helping him fold his vibrant sweaters and his silky pastel blouses into the packing case, “but you’re meant for something brighter.”

Seokmin was glad; he’d always thought the black overalls and black boots and little black cat were a bit overkill. Now, though, standing before the Witch with his fawn-colored hair and cheerful red cloak, he feels naive. Someone in a fable who is about to get tricked. 

He wonders what he should say. His own voice seems so powerless.

“Hello,” he begins, higher than usual in fearful anticipation. “My name is Seokmin. You saved me the other day.”

The Witch moves on the branch to look downward. Seokmin can see, now, that he’s holding a leather-bound sketchbook and a pencil. His pendant gleams even in the dark. His face hardly changes when he catches sight of Seokmin, guarded and closed off.

But everything is so soft and bright in the moonlight, like the unfinished oil painting inside the castle, and the Witch is as beautiful as he remembers, beautiful as a dream. So Seokmin forgets to be afraid when he asks, clear and steady, “What’s your name?”

“Minghao,” the Witch says immediately. Then he looks surprised at having given this information away.

A name is powerful. Seokmin repeats it to himself, feeling it in his mouth like a satiny piece of sea glass. Minghao watches him, wary. My, what sad eyes you have, Seokmin thinks.

“I really didn’t think you’d come,” Minghao says, a slight furrow in his brow.

“Was it you who— who spoke to Mingyu? You wanted to meet me?”

“My apprentice arranged it. He knew I—” Minghao looks vaguely flustered. “He knew I was having troubles.”

“What kind?”

“Something is intent on leading me toward you.”

Seokmin’s heart is hammering in his mouth. “I think something is drawing me to you, too. Like a cutlassfish on a fishing line or something. Wait, that sounds strange—” 

Minghao laughs, sudden, helpless to it. It sounds like a cluster of silver bells, like the ones at the door of Wonwoo’s bookshop.

“Seokmin,” he says. The name sounds important on his tongue. “You’re a song witch, aren’t you. I can tell. You have music in your voice.”

Seokmin doesn’t know how to answer that properly. He gets flustered and deflects. “What are you drawing?”

“A crow.” Minghao holds the sketchbook up to the moonlight. The pencil-shaded bird looks clever, eyes alight with mischief. 

“You’re a really good artist.”

Minghao ducks his head, but his smile is wry and satisfied. Seokmin feels a surge of something warm. He remembers what Soonyoung said about the curse. Someone like Minghao shouldn’t have to suffer a curse.

“Come down from the tree and talk to me,” Seokmin says, his voice plaintive and bare. “Please?”

And Minghao begins to comply, the heel of his boot finding a knot on the trunk, before he draws up short, his face becoming pale and terrified in the moonlight. 

Seokmin can hear his rapid breathing. It’s like the rustling of a crow’s wing.

“It nearly worked on me,” Minghao says.

“What?”

“Your magic.”

“What do you mean my—” 

The rustling grows. Something about Minghao starts to look different. “Oh. It’s happening. Don’t look at me. This was a mistake.” 

Seokmin’s eyes close of their own accord. The forest floor hums beneath his body. 

“Leave,” Minghao commands. 

“I don’t want to,” he says with great effort. He feels separated from his own voice. “I don’t want to leave you alone.”

But it’s slipped beyond his control. When he wrenches his eyes open seconds later, Minghao is nowhere to be seen.

“Wait,” Seokmin says brokenly, turning around in circles. As expected, his words are powerless. He only finds the trees and the blurry silhouette of a bird far above against the moon, fleeing from him. 

He tries to follow it and is on a frantic path back to the castle when he finds Jihoon curled up on a tree trunk nearby fast asleep. Enchanted, likely. He tucks his familiar absently into his cloak pocket as he trips over toadstools and roots and nearly sprains his ankle in his hurry. He doesn’t know the way, but it makes itself known to him, like he’s a needle in a compass, or a homing pigeon. 

The door to the castle is locked. Seokmin knocks on it with the crow’s-head knocker as hard as he can, over and over. The desperation he feels isn’t exactly fear. It’s like that strange thing Minghao said— something is leading them toward each other, inevitably. 

Only when the door swings open it reveals an entirely different witch, this one with a pitch-black robe and a heart-shaped smile. 

“Oh, hello,” Seokmin says, startled into politeness.

“Hello! I’m Junhui. His apprentice, you see.” Junhui looks both ways dramatically, then tugs him inside by the arm. “Did you find him?”

“Minghao?”

“You did!”

Junhui pauses. His face is open and attentive as he studies Seokmin for a few breathless seconds. Maybe he finds what he’s looking for, because something in the darkness of his eyes shifts liquid fast like a cat.

“You must come another time soon,” he decides, then steers Seokmin across the room, past the unfinished canvas and the staircase until they’re in front of another door. 

“Wait!” 

But the door is opening, and Junhui has already gently pushed him over the threshold. 

Seokmin stumbles forward. The ground under him is irregular and his boots sink into it with every uneven step. Sand. He’s standing on sand!

Before him the ocean glitters endless as the night, speckled with the reflections of the stars. 

Speechless, Seokmin wheels around. There’s no door behind him. 

The castle in the woods is far away. The woods themselves are far away, as is Minghao, who is lonely once again. Seokmin can feel it inside of him. As if somehow somewhere they’ve accidentally exchanged hearts. 

On the long walk home, Jihoon wakes up. Seokmin recounts the story, subdued, keeping his hand curled loosely around his own throat, feeling an ache of something horrible.

✧

  
  


During a delivery the next day a boy named Seungkwan supplies him with a platter of very pretty petit fours. Funnily enough, they look like they might be from Kim Bakery. 

“This is really fancy,” Seokmin says, concerned at the expense. This doesn’t, however, stop him from popping a block of strawberry shortcake into his mouth. “Aren’t the three of you college students?”

“That’s right. I’m studying journalism. I have lots of connections to free things and all. Perks of the occupation, you understand,” Seungkwan claims grandly, still bustling around, making minuscule adjustments to the spread and the cutlery. 

Seokmin figures he may have written a particularly generous review of Kim Bakery in the Town Crier. Jihoon, slinking around their chair legs sniffing at crumbs, bristles when Seungkwan tries to pet him. Seokmin gives him a warning look and he allows it. 

From across the kitchen table, Seungkwan’s roommate Chan asks, “What kind of a witch are you?”

“A song witch,” Seokmin explains. “Or at least I’m supposed to be. It’s...well…” 

He falters under the expectant gazes.

After he returned home from the ocean last night muted and upset with his broken broom and tired feet, he tried to explain what happened to Mingyu, but his words came out all wrong and he had a minor meltdown that mostly involved him trying his best not to tear up while violently kneading a piece of dough for the morning bread in order to feel a little bit useful. The version he told Mingyu ended up being more than somewhat vague, given that Seokmin never had been very good at summarizing things. 

As soon as Mingyu managed to fill in the gaps he pursed his mouth in a very Mingyu-like combination of concern and disappointment and apologized profusely. “I didn’t know the customer had anything to do with the Witch of the Woods,” he said, and Seokmin didn’t exactly know how to tell him that _that_ actually wasn’t the problem. 

Regardless, Mingyu calmed him down with a combination of an almond croissant and some hot chocolate, soothed his fears of being left alone to overthink about his own uselessness by promising a delivery job the next evening, and announced he could use Mingyu's own bicycle. It was assumed that there would be no more talk of magic, song or otherwise, until Seokmin fixed his broom.

But the next day when Seokmin reached the bright apartment near the clock tower with a suspiciously light package, it turned out that there actually was no delivery. Seungkwan and his two roommates only wanted to meet him and ask him all about his magic. They’d never had the chance to talk to a real live witch before, since Yeri and Seulgi’s coven regarded college-aged boys and really most men who didn’t have the ability to make top-tier pastries with no small amount of distaste.

“I’ve heard about song magic,” Hansol, Seungkwan’s other roommate, offers through a mouthful of marzipan. “You can use it for healing purposes, can’t you?”

“You’re right,” Seokmin says, hesitant. “My family has a potion shop, and my great-grandmother used to treat patients going through difficult times. The really good song witches can sing almost anything and make it real. But it takes a lot of practice and confidence, I guess.”

Seungkwan finally sits down and scoots his chair closer to Seokmin’s side of the square table. “Is it true the Witch of the Woods flew with you from the square the other day?”

Seokmin chokes on his cake.

“He’s right, y’know,” Chan says loudly as Seungkwan thumps Seokmin’s back. They’ve sensed something intriguing and are digging their fingers into it as fast as they can. “Everyone’s talking about it. You’re big news! The Witch hasn’t been seen around town for a whole year.”

Seokmin manages to swallow down the cake and disguises the swirl of feelings threatening to clog his throat up with a nervous laugh. 

“It was really unexpected. I’ve heard so many things about the Witch. So many! I can’t tell what’s true and what’s not anymore. Would you mind telling me what the story is?”

“Of course!” Seungkwan leans close, wobbly, his chair balancing on one leg. “The story goes, once upon a time, the Witch of the Woods was a normal boy who made a deal with a forest spirit. If mortals strayed too far into the woods, the forest spirit turned them into birds and trapped them.”

“Trapped them?” Seokmin thinks of the open gilded cages that he’d seen outside the castle last night. 

“Right. And in return for limitless power, the Witch agreed to help the spirit keep ownership of his forest. But the Witch became greedy in his pursuit of magic, so the spirit cursed him to turn into a bird if he strayed from the woods.”

“So you don’t know anything about the, um—” It feels silly, saying it out loud. “About the whole, er, the Witch falling in love with a boy and giving him his heart thing?”

“Oh, that’s just gossip and hearsay because people think the Witch’s human form is hot,” Seungkwan says matter-of-factly, at the same time that Chan protests that that’s the version of the story _he's_ more familiar with. They devolve into bickering. Hansol leans over, still chewing his marzipan. 

“There are all these stories, man, but no one actually knows what’s right and what’s not. The only part anyone knows for sure is the bird thing. Sometimes we see him flying over the ocean. It’s hard to miss him.”

“That must be a really hard existence.”

Hansol makes a face of acknowledgment. “I guess we wouldn’t be able to know what it’s like.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, like, being really scared of what’s inside of you. Whatever that thing is. And not being able to share it with anybody. And knowing other people won't understand it.”

Seokmin feels, for some reason, a little bit like he might start to cry. 

“I have to get going,” he says over the sound of Seungkwan and Chan still arguing. They fall silent. The chair’s legs scrape against the tile as he stands. “Thank you for the food. Don’t tell Mingyu I asked about the Witch. Okay?”

“Okay,” the three chorus. If they’re wondering why, they don’t say anything about it. 

Seokmin walks the bicycle home, Jihoon sitting in the basket. The chatter of the city square feels alien and distant. He keeps thinking about Minghao. How his face had changed before he made Seokmin close his eyes. 

How in the brief moments when Seokmin could see, instead of feeling frightened, he had felt nothing but that warm familiar feeling, a fireplace feeling, a coming home after a long day and watching the hearth glow feeling. Especially because he had noticed that Minghao had been the one who was scared. 

  
  


✧

  
  


In his dream that night, Seokmin waits on a cliff of green next to the ocean. The glossy ribbon around his straw hat brushes against his cheek in the breeze. 

The artist working behind the easel in front of him wears a cloak the color of the leaves in sunlight. Ever-shifting and kaleidoscopic. Although the canvas is obscuring his face, Seokmin knows who he is. 

The wind rises. Seokmin reaches up to hold his hat in place. 

“Stay still,” Minghao calls to him. 

When he leans sideways from out from behind his easel he’s wearing a gentle smile. Seokmin loves it when he smiles like that. When he lets himself be, simply be. It’s a form of magic. There’s a streak of dried paint across the bridge of his nose. 

“But my hat,” Seokmin protests.

“Let the wind carry it.”

Seokmin lets go. He watches it flutter down to the grass near Minghao. 

He wants to come to Minghao like a bird, come right to his palm like a sparrow. He wants to take Minghao’s hand and undo every little button of pearl at his cuff and kiss the inside of his wrist. He begins to move, his heart singing in his ears, and the dream melts like candle wax and becomes nothing. 

  
  


✧

  
  


“You should ask for help with the broom from Wonwoo,” Mingyu encourages in the morning when he notices Seokmin’s drawn face and misinterprets the reason. “Don’t worry about the store. Seungcheol’s gonna get here in an hour.”

“Oh, right.” Seungcheol’s buff and really good with massaging the fight out of any dough, and also with charming customers into buying way more than their initial intention. “I’ll only go if you promise you won’t get into another stupid fight with him over who decorates sugar cookies better.”

“At least I have enough common sense not to use royal icing,” Mingyu says, affronted, his ears already reddening. “Who the hell likes royal icing? Stop laughing, I’m so serious.”

Seokmin bicycles to Wonwoo’s with Jihoon and the broken broom, pedaling as slowly as possible. He doesn’t really want to bother Wonwoo with a small thing like this. But Jihoon, guessing his reluctance, reminds him that Wonwoo has some kind of connection to Minghao through Soonyoung. So in the end their curiosity wins out.

The shop is a place of wonder in the day. The gilded lettering on the display books glimmer in the sun. “Might be easier to just make a new broom,” Wonwoo muses, holding one of the splinter-ridden fragments up to the light to study the damage.

“Told you so,” Jihoon tells Seokmin, sounding very pleased with himself.

“Do you think…” 

Seokmin looks at Wonwoo, Wonwoo the very intelligent and experienced sigil witch, haloed in the sunlight through the windows of the bookshop he runs very competently, and looks away. 

“Do you think you could, um, help me with it?”

When he looks up, preparing himself for— (Well, for what exactly? No, I won’t help you, you’re such an amateur? No, I don’t want to associate myself with you, that’s embarrassing?) for whatever might happen, Wonwoo is giving him a look that might best be described as irritated-fond. The kind of look Seokmin used to give a stubborn starflower in his mother's shop who would only bloom if the warmth in the greenhouse was just right, if an appropriately reassuring amount of sunlight fell on it.

“Of course I’ll help,” Wonwoo says. 

Seokmin feels somewhat silly but mostly grateful. He beams, and Wonwoo’s smile grows.

Wonwoo himself isn’t too afraid to ask for assistance. He heads across the street to Seulgi’s coven’s apartment to beg for a spare handle and broom-corn and willow twine in exchange for the broken pieces of Seokmin’s broom, since Seulgi’s friend might have a good use for it. Seulgi hands Wonwoo a bundle of materials at the doorway. She studies Seokmin speculatively then decides he seems trustworthy enough. 

“Secretly it’s kind of a good thing I get to give some of this away. Joy’s been experimenting lately, I can’t _tell_ you how many splinters I’ve had to heal for her this week. She’ll be happy with this, though, she has this theory about how fixed-up broken brooms are better for flight.”

“Oh, good,” Seokmin says, grinning when Seulgi gives him a kind smile. “I’m glad it’ll be useful.”

“Yeah, I’ll say. It’s going to take a long time to fix, she’ll be busy with it.” Seulgi pokes at the fibers sticking out of the broken ends. “Wonwoo, give the new handle a preservation mark, would you? I feel like the kid could use it.”

Wonwoo does exactly that. Back in the shop, Seokmin watches him carve the applewood into smoothness with his small jeweled knife before cutting a sigil into the handle. 

“Looks like you took a pretty nasty fall, huh?”

“I ended up okay. It was in the woods,” Seokmin starts to explain, then pauses and tries to think of a good strategy. But it’s hopeless, because he feels like Wonwoo might know something important, so his excitement wins out. “Actually, it was right before I met— before I met Minghao again.”

Wonwoo looks up sharply. Okay. Maybe this was a mistake.

“You met Minghao again?”

“And I also met Soonyoung.”

Wonwoo contemplates him with great care. “What did Soonyoung say?”

“Not much. Only— well, he said something about how Minghao has this connection with— well, with me?”

“Hmmm.” Wonwoo narrows his eyes. Seokmin waits for him to say something else, but instead he gets to work with twining the broomcorn into a bundle. 

“Aren’t you going to tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“About the curse? About Minghao and Soonyoung? And what might be happening?”

A corner of Wonwoo’s mouth lifts as he works, his fingers practiced and sure. “I’m afraid it’s not my story to tell.”

“Oh.” Seokmin furrows his brow. “But Wonwoo, I really want to know. Please would you—”

“No,” Wonwoo interrupts before he can fully get the words out. Not angry. Just very firm. “That’s not going to work with me, Seokmin.”

“What’s not going to work?” Seokmin asks, a little bit whiny in his disappointment, and falls into a gloom when Wonwoo only laughs soft and low and refuses to explain what he means. 

✧

  
  


At night when he’s certain he can hear Mingyu snoring, Seokmin sneaks out the attic window with his new broom.

“This is an exceptionally bad idea,” Jihoon says from his shoulder as they sail across the slumbering town.

“Shhh. I know.”

“And yet?”

The wind is icy, but it feels good, like a fresh start. “I had a dream about him. That has to mean something. I have to talk to him, I have to know more about him. Aren’t you curious?”

“I am,” Jihoon admits, “but not to the point of self-endangerment.”

“How is this self-endangerment?”

But of course Seokmin is somewhat aware of it. It’s been at the back of his mind, fuzzy and distant. 

That’s why Jihoon is important. He’s the voice of reason, the barrier by the edge of the mountain, the last branch your sweater might catch on as you tumble off a very high tree. 

“One, clearly Minghao has little control over what we might call his transformation. Two, you don’t have a handle over your own magic at all. Three, the last time we were in the woods, you broke your broom and I got enchanted and missed everything, so if something bad had happened I wouldn’t have even been able to help. And we haven’t even talked about the funk you’ve been in.”

“What _funk,_ " Seokmin says, indignant. “I’ve been fine. I’ve been doing deliveries and talking to people and making friends.”

“You haven’t sung in so long, Seokmin,” Jihoon says solemnly. As if that’s some great important revelation. 

“I’m aware of that. Trust me, I’m aware. You don’t have to tell me.” Seokmin is a little horrified to find that he’s tearing up. “You don’t have to remind me, Jihoon. That’s what I’m trying and trying not to think about most of the, um, most of the time, anyways.”

He sniffs and swipes at his eyes. The dampness on his face is already freezing cold. 

Jihoon is quiet the rest of the way to the woods, but he apologetically rubs his cheek against a drying tear track. Seokmin takes the comfort and tries to think of other good things.

Mingyu always letting him help out, despite it ending up not-so-great sometimes. The cinnamon wreath bread Seungcheol made that hangs on the bakery’s front window, the one with tiny marzipan figurines— a red-cloaked witch and a little cat sitting on a broom. How Seokmin sometimes feels when walking down an alleyway in this strange city. Small in a good way, in a brand-new way where he can sometimes forget himself and sing along to a street performer’s tune. Wonwoo fixing his broom and asking for nothing in return. Minghao’s laugh. 

From so high above Seokmin begins to see slivers of the tower through the dense shaggy thicket. The feeling in his ribcage is that of a kite on a string. Being pulled home by his heart, hand-over-hand. But even without that feeling, he knows, somehow, that he could find his way here. The woods seem neverending as he descends, except for the small clearing where Minghao is waiting in front of the door. 

Minghao’s cloak is wrapped tight around his body. His arms are crossed over his chest. It comes off more as an attempt to comfort himself than a gesture of haughtiness. 

Behind him, the open birdcages sway in the wind. They’re empty tonight except for two small snow-white doves cooing anxiously, their song small and lonely in the vast night.

“I had to find you,” Seokmin says as he lands, his chest rising and falling, heart starting its race. “I’m sorry. Please don’t be afraid of me. I’m not afraid of you.”

“I’m not,” Minghao says, eyes careful. He steps backward the way a dancer might, toe-to-heel, but it’s stilted. An attempt to buy time. “I’m not afraid. I just don’t want you to…to see me as…”

“It doesn’t matter what I see and what I don’t see.” Seokmin steps closer. “I’m not important. I’m useless, I’m no good at magic.”

“Don’t say that,” Minghao admonishes him. “Anyone can tell that isn’t true.”

“Will you let me inside? I’ll leave. If you want me to.”

Minghao regards him, the wind gently lifting his hair up from his lonely eyes. In the moonlight the shadows of his face are tinted blue. It makes Seokmin very sad to look at him, in a quiet desperate way that hums inside of him like a spell.

“Come in for a little while,” Minghao says eventually. 

He ducks his head under the birdcages and turns to unlock the castle door, but Seokmin catches sight of how his face has cracked open into softness, yearning for company. He must be scared of that feeling.

Seokmin asks, “Why did you save me? At the town square?”

“Because you asked me to,” Minghao says plainly.

He swings the heavy door open, and the warm light from within glows orange on his face. He steps to the side and lets Seokmin enter.

The fire is crackling at its grate. Minghao shrugs his cloak off and hangs it on a coat-stand by the hearth. He’s in the same white blouse as the day he met Seokmin in the square. 

Seokmin kneels to warm his frozen fingers over the fire, his teeth chattering. Jihoon leaps down from his shoulder and begins to explore. The oil painting by the hearth has started to take shape, but it’s still murky. 

“Are Soonyoung and Junhui around?”

“They’re outside, in the forest.” Minghao doesn’t explain what they’re doing out in the cold. Seokmin thinks about the cages. He’s dismissed Seungkwan’s story, but he does think that the birds are important in some way. 

“Oh, you must be freezing,” Minghao notices. “I have some soup.”

He heads into the kitchen. Seokmin waits, listening to the sleepy sounds of the fire. “It’s so quiet in here. It must get lonely.”

“It’s not so bad,” Minghao calls from the kitchen, defensive. “Most of the time I have Soonyoung and Junhui. And,” he tacks on, as if sensing the question, “I have the birds. They’re wild birds, they like to be free. But I’m able to understand them. They’re like…I suppose they’re like friends.” 

He comes back holding a small pot and a bowl and sets it on the table. Seokmin doesn’t move away from the hearth, still basking in the warmth.

“Is that part of your magic? As a witch? Or…”

He never was very good at tact. Minghao shutters. 

“You’re mistaken. I’m not a witch like you,” Minghao says, refusing to look at Seokmin. “I’m something much worse.” 

Minghao tastes the soup and winces, muttering about how cold it is. He heads over to a bronze cauldron over the fireplace to heat it. He gestures with his finger and the wooden spoon within the cauldron swirls in slow circles. The jewel in his ring is winking with light again.

“Well, whatever you are, you’ve helped me,” Seokmin insists. “And your magic is strong, and you don’t use it for bad things. Do you think I might— do you think I might be able to learn from you?”

Minghao gives him a wry look, like he’s trying very hard not to smile. “I think I wouldn’t be able to teach you much.”

“Oh?” Seokmin tries and fails to hide his disappointment.

“No. Your magic’s the magic of speech.” Minghao contemplates something, then kneels down next to Seokmin. When Minghao decides he wants to hold someone’s gaze, it’s hard to look away. “It’s like…to you, a word only matters if you believe someone’s going to hear it. If you believe someone’s going to hear you.”

“Like that saying about a tree in the forest?”

“I suppose so.” Minghao reaches out to smooth back a strand of Seokmin’s mussed hair in a quick natural motion. When his hand brushes the gold leaf-shaped earring nestled on the outer shell of Seokmin’s ear, it sparks with a tiny shock. “Why don’t you have that belief?”

Seokmin blinks and tries to comprehend his own heart. 

“Because I just don’t have enough power. I mean, to justify the belief, I guess.”

Minghao’s soft mouth downturns almost petulantly. Up close Seokmin can see two dewdrop-shaped earrings of jade peeking through his inky hair. His hair, in fact, seems to billow gently even indoors, an eternal breeze shifting through him.

“You should stop saying things like that. They have significance, even if you think they don’t.”

“I had a dream about you,” Seokmin blurts, then reddens.

Minghao stands in order to ladle the soup back into the wooden bowl, trying not to smile again. It’s funny. Sometimes he’s almost bashful. Really he’s just a young man, just like Seokmin, nothing scary, nothing so immense. 

“Me too,” Minghao admits. “In my dream I was painting you by the sea. It came out wrong because you wouldn’t sing. Why do you think you don’t have power? Where do you think your power comes from?”

“Well, my mother used to say witches have hearts of magic inside of them.”

“I like that,” Minghao says. He sits back down, cross-legged on the hearth and watches Seokmin taste a spoonful of the soup. It’s something seasoned with wild garlic and it tastes of the woods after rain, aromatic and rich. “You know, maybe all people have different kinds of hearts. A witch’s heart. An artist’s heart, a baker’s heart…a forest’s heart.”

“Is that what you have? A forest’s heart?”

“I don’t know what’s inside of me.”

“Neither do I, most of the time,” Seokmin says. “I don’t think that’s such a bad thing.”

Minghao stares at him. His smile grows. He looks content, bathed in firelight, his eyes shining like the ocean at night.

“Hold your hand out.”

Seokmin holds his right hand out, palm up. Minghao is sliding his silver ring off. The tiny red jewel set within it glows brightly. He presses it into Seokmin’s hand and flattens his own so they’re palm-to-palm. 

“If you need help,” he says, “real help, call on me. But I’m asking you not to seek me out.”

“Why?”

“Something’s happening to me. Since the day I met you it’s been getting worse, whatever it is, even though I thought it would get better. Even here in the woods. Soonyoung and Junhui are out foraging for herbs. They’re trying to help my— my condition.”

Seokmin looks at Minghao and sees someone who yearns to speak to his friends but lets them fly away from him all the same. In a brief surge of courage, he interlocks their fingers. Minghao stills. 

It reminds him of a hummingbird finding a perch. Seokmin’s always wondered about those tiny bright creatures. How the beat of their heart seems to be tied to the endless flutter of their wings. He feels Minghao’s magic quivering between them like the wavering of reality around the edges of the fire. It must be exhausting to be aware of such power.

Sharpness digs into his knuckles and knifes deep enough to draw blood. When he looks down, startled, he sees that Minghao’s nails have become long black talons. 

Minghao extricates his hand.

“For your own good, don’t seek me out anymore,” he warns, his expression already regretful. 

But his voice is bottomless, in two layers, oil and water. 

The firelit room blurs like paint streaking together then forms a long deep well into nothingness that Seokmin drops into, sudden, his breath snatched from him. 

He falls and falls, reaching his hand up towards the fading warmth of the fire distancing, the light as it becomes a pinprick above him. And that light, too, goes, and there’s nothing, for a little while.

Then he feels sand, gritty against his cheek. He can smell the sea.

At first, the sea here always smells like rot. You have to coach yourself into noticing the good parts of it. 

Seokmin opens his eyes blearily, taking deep breaths through his nose. He’s lying on the beach, tucked inside his cloak like it’s a blanket. The full moon glows above him, almost too big. He sits up blinking at its blurry nightmarish brightness. Jihoon is nearby on the sand. 

Seokmin studies his own injured right hand. His fingers are curled into a loose fist in the sand. Dried blood cakes his throbbing knuckles. He’ll have to wrap them up. 

He unfurls his fingers and finds Minghao’s ring. 

“Did I fall asleep?” Seokmin asks Jihoon. “I can’t remember exactly what happened. It feels sort of like a dream.”

Jihoon pads closer. Then he meows.

“What?” 

His familiar repeats his question, and all Seokmin hears is a soft and befuddling _mraow?_

His stomach plummets. 

_Mraow,_ Jihoon says, climbing up into his lap, batting at his face. _Mraow? Mraow?_

“I don’t understand you,” Seokmin tells him. His eyes are welling up with tears. “Jihoon, I can’t understand you. I don’t know why. I’m sorry.”

  
  


✧

  
  


“When I’m feeling down, I always make this pie. It’s herring and pumpkin. Jihoon might like it, too.” 

Then Mingyu realizes his mistake, which is bringing Jihoon up at all, and tries to cover for it with a series of loud coughs. 

“Anyways, do you think you could help me? Building the fire might be tricky, but I figure you’ll be able to handle it.” 

Of course Mingyu doesn’t need help, he could probably make the pie in his sleep. He’s very obviously only trying to ply Seokmin into participation. After all, he knows Seokmin probably would’ve spent most of the day in bed, even though it’s been raining heavily and the attic is collecting puddles, if it weren’t for Mingyu’s insistence that he could be very useful right now since the pie has to be cooked in the wood-fired oven.

“Okay,” Seokmin says listlessly and tries not to feel sorry for himself when Mingyu reaches all the way across the counter just to pat his shoulder. 

He pulls his cloak’s hood up and heads out into the steady downpour. Jihoon trails behind him to the shed where the firewood is stacked.

“I think this is the same kind of wood as my broom handle,” Seokmin tells him as he struggles to take a bundle into his arms. Then he remembers and shuts up. 

To his dismay, Jihoon meows and leaps away over the wet brick garden wall like a wild alley cat. Seokmin watches him go and can’t even muster up a _Wait_ or a _Please._

He trudges back into the kitchen through the rain, and Mingyu hands him a matchbook. Seokmin silently stuffs newspaper and kindling into the oven. He strikes a match, but the wood only smolders. 

“Here, I can—” 

“You asked for my help, didn’t you,” Seokmin snaps, then strikes another match before he can feel bad about it. 

This one takes, and sparks begin to swirl in the darkness. He pokes at the glowing embers with the fire iron for a few minutes until the flames roar gold and orange, billowing cheerful smoke. It gets into his eyes, gritty and hot, and he blinks hard, swiping roughly at his face. His cheeks and ears are burning. Not exactly from the fire. 

“Alright,” Mingyu says from behind him, sounding still a little wary but all in all fairly resigned to being snarled at. Which is somewhat sad. Seokmin hates how readable his own tendencies are. “I think it’s good.” 

The pie goes inside. Seokmin swings the door shut and breathes the humid haze in. 

He has a smaller version of that same smog threatening to choke his own windpipe up for good. Maybe that would be better, if he simply lost the ability to make a sound. He doesn’t want to turn around and face Mingyu. He can hear him clinking around at the kitchen table, probably with a tea set or something. 

It’s been a week since Seokmin’s magic left him. Left totally, one hundred percent. He can’t even get his broom more than a few centimeters off the ground. Yesterday, Mingyu got Seulgi and Wonwoo to come by and see him up in the attic, but Seokmin couldn’t help but be weirdly quiet the whole time. He’d made friends, but suddenly he couldn’t bear to be with any of them. 

Still, Mingyu’s trying hard. He hasn’t said anything about the delivery service or the woods at all, even though Seokmin thinks Mingyu has guessed that was where he went the night the magic left him. 

Seokmin sighs and turns around to face the kitchen table. 

Mingyu is wearing an extremely hopeful expression and has indeed gotten out a nice tea set. There’s a ceramic plate filled with little round pastries. He nudges it forward. 

They’re walnut cakes. The same kind Seokmin always talks about being homesick for, the ones Jeonghan used to nick for him from the shop after an argument or a bad day. 

“Seokmin?”

He stares at Mingyu for a few seconds, his irritation turning into guilt, then bursts into tears. 

Mingyu gapes. “Oh, stars.” 

“No, no, it’s not you, it’s—” Seokmin sniffles and gestures vaguely. “Thanks. That’s really, I mean, I don’t deserve—”

“Hey.” Mingyu’s mouth twists in frustration. “You need to stop saying things like that. You’re my friend, and I care about you. And you shouldn’t be so upset. That’s all that matters.” 

He crosses his arms over his apron and doesn’t stop frowning until Seokmin sits down at the table and eats one of the cakes. It tastes a little bit like salty cardboard as he chews on it because he’s still teary, but it also tastes a lot like home.

Mingyu really is doing his best to be patient. It must be taking a lot out of him, because his shoulders are sort of slumped when he sits down across the table and he watches Seokmin the way he might watch a stray dog he’s trying to get closer to.

Seokmin decides to offer him an olive branch.

“Even a few months ago, I used to sing all the time,” he starts. 

His voice sounds like he has a bad cold, and he laughs at himself. Mingyu hands him an embroidered handkerchief and he blows his nose. 

“Go on,” Mingyu encourages.

“I used to sing so much it was annoying. Jihoon knows. I didn’t even have to think about it, I’d just sing, and I could make a plant grow, or a potion steep faster. Or I could make my mom feel better if she’d had a hard day.”

“And then what happened?” Mingyu asks carefully.

“I don't know.” Seokmin stares at his hands in his lap. His right hand still has gauze wrapped around the knuckles. “I can’t even remember how I used to do it. Maybe it’s being homesick. Or maybe it’s just growing up and learning to be afraid of things.”

“How come you’re not afraid of the woods?”

He thinks of Minghao, his birds and his sketchbook and the defensiveness that protects what is soft and scared beneath. 

“The woods have someone who makes me feel like myself,” Seokmin realizes.

  
  


✧

  
  


It’s raining. Seokmin splashes through puddles and mud, breathless, a stitch in his side. The branches above him form cat’s cradles against the moon. He doesn’t even have his broom. 

He woke up at the witching hour with a sharp jab digging into his chest, a phantom knife, and instantly knew something was wrong with Minghao. 

With every step, he says under his breath, _Please._ And the forest seems to shrink as he runs, becoming what he says, what he wills it to. He feels Minghao somewhere near his breastbone, like a second heart. 

Junhui is at the door in the forest waiting for him. “It’s getting worse,” he says. “Minghao’s getting worse. Something’s happening.” 

He looks pale and sweat-sheened, anxious the way Mingyu has been around Seokmin this last week. 

“I want to try and help him.” 

Junhui opens the door.

Curled up by the hearth is Soonyoung. He looks distinctly unwell. In fact he almost looks ghost-like, white as snow and semi-transparent. There are footprints across the room and up the lightless stairs, dark footprints that look like drying blood. Damp feathers lie scattered around the prints like shriveling leaves. 

Seokmin picks one up and it disintegrates into nothing in his hand.

“Hurry,” Soonyoung warns him softly.

Seokmin takes a candle and lights it at the fireplace with his shaky hands. He follows the footsteps of sap, the candle flickering and creating trembling shadows as he walks up the stairs, his breath shallow with panic. 

Upstairs the only sound is the rain on the stone roof of the castle. He is at the mouth of a long dark hallway. As he walks it becomes a tunnel, the wind howling through it, the small flame of his candle nearly sputtering out. 

Vines and dead plants and stray flowers wreath the walkway, growing out from the sides of the tunnel. Seokmin can name every one of them. He says them out loud to give himself courage.

“Blue moonwort,” he whispers. “Cowslip. Vervain.” He remembers the sunny greenhouse of his home. The plants of the tunnel wall are turning towards him, heliotropic, and his voice rises. “Evening primrose. Meadowsweet…”

He keeps walking, his own voice echoing in his ears, until he hears Minghao breathing. Until he hears the rustle of feathers. And then he sees Minghao’s form. The one Minghao doesn’t want him to see.

Only it’s not so bad, now. Just a massive bundle of blue-black darkness.

“I hurt you,” Minghao says in a low guttural voice that is muffled from the way his head is buried under his wing.

“It’s just a scratch,” Seokmin says. His voice comes out crushed and low because he’s trying not to cry. “It’ll heal. Are you in pain? What’s happening?”

“Go away.”

“No. I’m not going away. I’m going to help break your curse.”

“You? You can’t even break your own curse,” Minghao says.

The wind rises. Stray feathers flutter past Seokmin’s face. The back of his neck is prickling and his eyes sting as if from a sea breeze.

“But I understand, I do. I know why I can’t fly anymore. Why I can’t speak to Jihoon.” He wipes his wet cheeks and ignores the salt burn in his throat. “It’s myself, isn’t it? I say things, and they come to life. I said I was useless, and my magic has no power. So that’s what happened.”

Minghao doesn’t reply. Seokmin comes closer, reaches forward through the dark. Minghao’s feathers look oil-slick and gluey as if they’ve been dipped in tree sap. 

One time, a crow flew into the window of the greenhouse at home. It lay in the grass, so strangely small, so forlorn. Seokmin knelt before it and held it in his palms. It was limp as a dead thing, its bones nothing but dry twigs. He remembers now how he whispered something to it and its heart crackled alive again and began to beat. Slow, and then fast. The way rain starts.

Seokmin touches Minghao’s trembling feathers. They are downy and soft. Nothing how they seem at first. He smooths them down, strokes them gently, over and over.

“That means I can break your curse,” Seokmin whispers. He whispers so his voice doesn’t break from all he has inside of himself. He’s like an ocean. He can hold so much. “I’m going to help you, Minghao.”

“You can’t.” The wind rises in a scream.

“But you don’t understand. I love you.”

“You’re too late,” Minghao says, and raises his head from under his wing. 

He bares his teeth. He has the mouth of a wolf, daggers surrounding his scarlet tongue. A monstrous and feral sight. 

Seokmin should be scared, but all he can see is Minghao. Minghao, who saved him just because he held his hand out. Minghao who inhabits his dreams, who sees him for who he has always been. Minghao who keeps the birdcages open.

Who is standing up and up, so high above him, unfurling his wings.

Minghao takes flight. The wind dies down, and Seokmin is alone in the tunnel, shivering in the dark.

“Please,” he sobs, and buries his face in his hands, and tries his hardest to think. 

Minghao’s ring begins to hum against his cheekbone. He lifts his head and studies it, the tiny pulsating jewel blinking at him. 

It wants to lead him somewhere. 

He listens and follows its song. Down the tunnel and down the stairs, to the hearth where Soonyoung has nearly faded into nothing.

Jihoon is sitting near the fireplace as if he’s always been there, waiting for him.

“Are you coming with me?” Seokmin asks the cat.

He trails behind Seokmin saying nothing. They walk to the door that leads to the ocean. Only when Seokmin opens it, there’s no ocean. There’s only a rectangle of complete silent darkness.

Seokmin takes a brave breath and steps through it. 

  
  


✧

  
  


He finds himself in a clearing of green at the mouth of a forest. Jihoon mewls up at the sky. 

There are trails of stars streaking across the indigo blue, falling stars landing in the lake, in the faraway woods, in the grass, rapidly expiring into black sap.

Stars have a very short lifespan on Earth. They’re the opposite of wild birds. They need to be tethered.

There is a boy nearby, silhouetted by the jagged forest in the distance. It’s a young Minghao. He has the same eyes as present-day Minghao. 

“We’re in his childhood,” Seokmin tells Jihoon. 

The stars are plummeting around Minghao, streaks of shimmering silver that dissipate so quickly. One of them falls into his hands and sparkles in sunbursts of golden and orange.

Minghao whispers something kind to it for a few seconds. Then he swallows it and doubles over, clutching his chest. 

The light is blinding for a few seconds. When Seokmin can see again, there’s another boy standing in front of Minghao with hair made of starlight. 

“It’s Soonyoung,” Seokmin says, wondrous. “Soonyoung is the star. Minghao saved him. He gave him his heart.”

The ground beneath him opens up into a void. 

He and Jihoon begin to fall away from the past, but before the night can disappear from sight, Seokmin realizes he must say something. He must throw Minghao a line, tie it to his own self and cast it forward with all his might.

“Minghao,” he calls, as loud as he can, his voice cresting into something joyous, “it’s Seokmin! I know how to help you now! Find me in the future!”

  
  
  


✧

  
  


When the darkness dissipates, he’s kneeling on the sandy beach under the moon. It’s still raining. The ocean is lapping up from its boundaries.

“Try it,” Jihoon encourages him.

“I want to see him,” Seokmin tells the sea in his own voice, plain and simple.

A bird comes tumbling out of the sky like a falling star made of black feathers. 

Minghao lands with a splash, the reflections of the stars shimmering. Sea foam ripples outward from his sinking body in circles. 

Seokmin throws his cloak and boots off and wades into the freezing cold water. The sand is slippery beneath his toes. He ducks his head down and kicks, reaches without having to look until he grasps Minghao’s cloak, the silk almost like oil in his hands, but not quite. Because he can hold it. He can grasp it as tightly as possible. 

He pulls Minghao out of the water and carries him to shore, lies him down on the beach. Minghao stares up at the sky. 

The stars gleam in his eyes’ velvet darkness. The feathers are beginning to dissolve. Seokmin brushes them away from his face along with the seawater and the stray raindrops. 

“I’m sorry I took so long,” Seokmin whispers, and leans down to kiss him. All the warmth in the world makes a hearth out of his mouth. He pulls away and presses his palm into Minghao’s heart and feels it racing, too. 

“There is no curse to break,” Seokmin says, willing it. Commanding it. He can feel his own power in his voice. He isn’t just a song witch. He’s something much stronger. “You committed a selfless act. A heart isn’t something that you give away. You share it, like trees in the woods sharing water. You’re a forest.”

The sea breeze picks up. The sap-soaked feathers are carried away in it like a swirl of autumn leaves. 

Beneath it all lies Minghao. Just Minghao. He blinks, then slowly sits up on his elbows until his face is inches away from Seokmin’s.

“It’s about your belief. What you think you are. Minghao, your problem is that you’re afraid of the same things as me. You have to believe people seeing you for who you really are isn't something to be scared of.” 

Minghao is momentarily flustered, his face trapped between relief and wonder. Then he shakes his head and takes Seokmin’s hand, presses the bandages knuckles to his mouth. 

“You too,” he tells Seokmin. 

✧

  
  
  


“I wouldn’t exactly call that a sigil,” Wonwoo starts, not unkindly. “More of a…”

“A disaster,” Jihoon mutters from up on the table, pawing at Soonyoung’s drawing critically. 

“A scribble. A doodle. An abstract art piece,” Junhui puts in cheerfully from Soonyoung’s other side, stuffing his face with another one of Seungcheol’s cookies. 

“No royal icing,” Mingyu had confirmed when he handed Seokmin the pastel ribbon-wrapped box. He’d wanted to come to meet Minghao himself, but Seokmin told him they were trying to take the whole letting the world flood in again thing a little slowly. 

Standing in the kitchen, box in hands, Seokmin tried to come up with a proper way to thank Mingyu for all he’d done for a solid thirty seconds. Then Mingyu cuffed him lightly on the shoulder, laughing at his face, and pulled him into a hug. And Seokmin didn’t even have to say anything at all. Mingyu got it. 

Soonyoung frowns down at his not-sigil. “I think it’s perfect,” he announces, and shows it to Seokmin. It’s truly a mystery. Seokmin gives him a thumbs-up.

Soonyoung's responding grin is bright as ever. Even though he and Minghao now know there’s no magical bond tethering them together, Soonyoung’s decided to still live in the castle. Although apparently Wonwoo’s made a standing offer to have him apprentice in the bookshop, which is a sight Seokmin is very much looking forward to.

“He’s outside, by the way,” Junhui says to Seokmin casually, still studying Soonyoung’s drawing with the air of a seasoned art critic. “Bet he’s waiting for you to go find him. Dramatic.”

Seokmin pulls on his gloves and scarf on his way out and takes his broom. Icicles sparkle in the sun where the birdcages once were.

He follows the footprints in the snow out into the thicket, humming to himself. The evergreens are cloaked in white, and as he walks he imagines he hears the wild birds somewhere far away, always singing.

Minghao is sitting up in his favorite fir tree, his boots dangling in the air as he sketches. 

“I’m coming up!” Seokmin calls. His broom floats easily to the uppermost branch. Minghao reaches a hand out to him and Seokmin holds tight and helps himself onto the bough. “What about your painting in the castle?”

“I’m taking a break. I thought I’d do something small for myself.”

He sits down on the bough and rests his chin in the crook of Minghao’s neck. The sketch is of a flock of crows flying together over a big forest.

Minghao turns to look at him, grinning. “What do you think?”

Seokmin smiles back, pushes Minghao's hair out of his face and studies him exactly as he is. A smudge of graphite on his cheek, his eyes glittering in the sun.

“You know what I think."

“And how do you feel?”

“I was feeling blue,” Seokmin says, “but I’m better now.”

**Author's Note:**

> ♡__ ♡ thank u so much for reading!!
> 
> find me on [twt](https://twitter.com/sunsburst) and [cc](https://curiouscat.me/sunsburst)


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